At Pooka & Co, we talk a lot about values, open source, people-first digital, and doing work that actually helps. But those things don’t come from a single manifesto or a neatly written strategy document.
They come from people.
So we asked our team a simple question: what genuinely inspires you in your work? Not what sounds good on a website, but the things that motivate you, frustrate you, or quietly push you to do things better.
What came back was a mix of order and curiosity, people and process, irritation and optimism. Different starting points, shared direction.
Rather than over-explaining, we’ll let the team tell their stories.
Paul: Finding Calm (and Clarity) in Order
You remember those guys in High Fidelity that organised their record collections in ridiculous detail: alphabetic, chronological, colour of spine… that’s me. Everywhere.
Some call it OCD, but Obsessive Compulsive DISorder has always sounded like an oxymoron to me. In my world, it’s Obsessive Compulsive Order, and without wanting to turn this into a TED talk, I’ve turned those compulsions into a superpower.
At Pooka, that shows up in the work I love doing every day:
- Turning the rainbow, and all of Microsoft Word’s fonts, into concise brand guidelines and clear website designs.
- Taking reams of messy content and shaping it into intuitive navigation, manageable structure, and strong calls to action.
- Helping our wonderful team stay organised, prioritised, and delivering great work, even when there’s a constant influx of ideas and competing tasks.
Order isn’t about control. It’s about making things usable, calm, and understandable, for teams and for users.
Ivan: Curiosity, Complexity, and Open Source
What inspires me is WordPress itself, and the huge ecosystem of plugins around it, some of which are incredibly complex.
WordPress can look simple on the surface, but under the hood there’s a huge amount of effort, collaboration, and deep technical knowledge. That’s what amazes me. It connects to open source software more broadly too: we can work with it, learn from it, and build on what others have shared.
That openness is a real opportunity. You’re never starting from nothing, and you’re never learning alone.
Lidia: Simplicity, Collaboration, and Making Things Work
What motivates me is finding simple solutions to complex problems. That’s the goal. There’s an elegance to making something complicated feel intuitive and straightforward.
The most valuable reward comes right at the end, when you open the finished website or feature, look at it as a user would, and think: “Great. This works.”
But the real work happens long before that moment.
I value the stage where a complex task isn’t solved yet, when things are still unclear and we have to figure it out together. Talking it through with colleagues, sharing perspectives, testing ideas, that’s where the learning happens.
Again and again, I’ve found the same pattern: the most effective, simple solutions come from collaboration. From combining different kinds of expertise, experience, and ways of thinking.
Mads: Productive Laziness and Smarter Systems
My innate laziness, and deep dislike of repetitive tasks, is the reason I have any sort of career.
In my twenties, I realised that a spreadsheet and a bit of code could do most of the boring admin work I was being paid to do. So I automated it. Then I got given more boring admin work, and automated that too.
By my thirties, I had better words for it: digital transformation, automation, integration. I started applying those ideas across whole departments, using tools like WordPress and CiviCRM to free up time, not just for me, but for everyone else too.
Last year I turned 40 and I’m delighted to be working with Pooka, where I get to help organisations spend less time wrestling with systems and more time doing the work they actually care about. Looking back, I’ve put an impressive amount of effort into avoiding boring tasks, and I’m strangely proud of that.
Marcus: Open Source as a Way of Thinking
I first came across open source software while working with arts organisations in England and Scotland in the early 2000s. In 2008, I discovered WordPress, and I was immediately inspired by the idea that a free, community-built tool could be used by anyone, anywhere, to create and communicate on a global scale.
Seeing developers, designers, and users collaborate openly to build something greater than the sum of its parts really stuck with me. It fundamentally shaped how I think about technology and the web, that sense of shared purpose, democratisation, and accessibility.
At Pooka & Co, open source is at the heart of how we work. We use tools like WordPress, WooCommerce, and CiviCRM to solve real-world problems. More recently, as big tech increasingly encroaches on every part of our lives, I’ve been making a conscious effort to embrace open source beyond work too.
Last year, I ditched Windows in favour of Linux across my devices, choosing Zorin OS. It’s more robust, less prone to crashes, and deeply satisfying to use. It’s reinforced my belief that open source isn’t just an alternative, it’s often the better choice, professionally and personally.
Sian: Friction, Frustration, and the People Behind the Screens
There are two things that really motivate me in my work, and they’re more closely linked than they might first appear.
The first is that almost physical reaction I have when I’m online and think: oh no… this could be so much better. Or, just as often: wow, you have so much good stuff here, why isn’t anyone seeing it?
I see brilliant organisations, businesses, and people doing genuinely important, creative work, and it’s buried. The story isn’t clear. The website makes things harder than they need to be. And I want to jump up and down and shout: you have such an amazing story to tell, please let me help you tell it properly.
The flip side shows up when I’m on the other end, trying to support a museum, a restaurant, an independent bookshop. I shouldn’t have to play detective to book a ticket, find an address, or ask a simple question. None of this is malicious, but it is alienating, and completely avoidable.
At the heart of all of this isn’t technology. It’s people.
What really inspires me is listening properly. The conversations between strategy sessions. The questions that land in my inbox that start with “are we doing this right?” The lightbulb moments when someone realises they do have something worth saying, and that it doesn’t have to be complicated or intimidating.
Good digital communication isn’t about shouting louder. It’s about making space for people’s work to be seen, understood, and supported.
Different Starting Points, Shared Direction
What’s striking, looking across these stories, is how different they are and how neatly they fit together.
Order and curiosity. Frustration and optimism. People, systems, and shared responsibility.
Some of us are motivated by clarity. Others by fairness, efficiency, or the quiet satisfaction of things working properly. But again and again, the same thing shows up: the best work doesn’t happen in isolation.
It happens in the messy middle, in conversations, problem-solving, and collaboration. In combining different perspectives and areas of expertise to turn complexity into something usable, intuitive, and human.
That mix is what makes Pooka work, and why we’re better together than we would ever be alone.
Get In Touch
We’d love to hear what you’re up to. Please get in touch using hello@pooka.co or through the form linked below. Don’t be shy!
